Abstract
There is conceptual confusion in academic scholarship regarding Indigenous research methodologies and decolonising research methodologies. Scholars view these paradigms as similar yet distinct, but very few seek to define that distinction. In this article, I explore the relationship between these approaches to academic research. Both paradigms emphasise the need to transform the academy because of its tendency to marginalise non-Western epistemologies. Transformation requires the interconnection and co-ordination of many paradigms including Indigenous, feminist, and antiracist approaches to research. I propose viewing Indigenous and decolonising research methodologies as a relationship, and suggest both are dynamic practices that do not exist outside of the people who use them. What they look like and how they relate to one another will depend upon who uses them, why they are used, and where they are practiced.
Keywords
Methodologies; decolonisation; place-based research; critical university studies; sociology of knowledge
There is conceptual confusion in academic literature regarding the distinction between Indigenous research methodologies and decolonising research methodologies. At the very least, the distinction between decolonising and Indigenous research is undefined. A chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research on ‘Decolonizing Research Practice: Indigenous Methodologies, Aboriginal Methods, and Knowledge/Knowing’ (Evans et al. 2014) appears to tackle this question. The authors argue that Indigenous methodologies are an important pathway towards decolonisation,
1 Acknowledgements: I extend thanks to Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez, Dwayne Donald, and Ken Caine for their guidance with writing this article and approaching the subject matter in a respectful way. Any errors are my own.
although Indigenous research exceeds decolonising research in that it contains a ‘revitalizing’ impulse (Evans et al. 2014, 3). While acknowledging that decolonising and Indigenous research are ‘closely related topics,’ the authors focus primarily on Indigenous methodologies and do not explore decolonisation in a substantial way (Evans et al. 2014, 1). George Sefa Dei (2013, 29) situates Indigenous research under the umbrella of decolonisation, which he views as a ‘broader, transformative project.’ For him, Indigenous research is therefore one element in a much larger program to decolonise all facets of life. Aman Sium, Chandni Desai, and Eric Ritskes (2012) share this perspective and suggest that decolonisation is a multidimensional project consisting of many diverse goals and possible pathways, but they also insist that Indigenous knowledges are central to this project because of their place-based awareness (Sium et al. 2012, ii). Sium et al. (2012, ii) ultimately confront the same dilemma as me: that Indigenous knowledges are diverse and ‘decolonization is a messy, dynamic, and a contradictory process.’ Margaret Kovach (2009) highlights one of its messiest contradictions. She suggests that Indigenous methodologies are rooted in ‘tribal’ epistemologies while decolonising methodologies derive from Western critical theory (Kovach 2009, 80). If this is so, then Indigenous and decolonising methodologies are radically different from one another and may at times be epistemologically incompatible.
The distinction between Indigenous and decolonising methodologies has significant implications for the way one conducts research because methodologies, as distinct from methods, constitute a paradigm or worldview. Whereas ‘method’ refers to a particular mode of data collection and analysis, ‘methodology’ refers to a broader set of assumptions about the nature of reality, what constitutes knowledge, and how knowledge is acquired. Methodology is the framework that sets the parameters of research and guides the entire research process: it determines the purpose of research, the research question, and one’s approach to it (Kovach 2009, 122; Tuck and McKenzie 2015, 76; Smith 2012, 144). Some researchers refer to Indigenous methodologies in the plural to distinguish between Indigenous and Western frameworks (Kovach 2009, 20-21), although I do so primarily to emphasise the diversity of Indigenous and decolonising methodologies (Absolon 2011, 118-120).
This article attempts to understand the distinction between Indigenous research methodologies and decolonising research methodologies. It draws on the academic literature and seeks to weave together disparate and contradictory ideas about research into a coherent narrative. I use Indigenous and decolonising approaches to research to illuminate one another, and consider that each methodological approach is in some way a reflection of the other and thus contains the other within itself. I begin by addressing how Indigenous perspectives of place help to understand knowledge production within the university. Dominant forms of knowledge produced in the academy reproduce Eurocentric and colonial orders while marginalising non-Western epistemologies. If non- Western researchers are to conduct non-Western research within the academy, there is
need for radical transformation of this institution. Decolonising the academy will require a concerted effort from Indigenous, feminist, antiracist, and other researchers, for each one has a unique perspective of colonialism. Indigenous methodologies offer particular insight because they help researchers view colonialism as a complex, multidimensional, and interrelated system, and they therefore emphasise the need for decolonising practices to be equally layered. A relational approach helps to understand not just the colonial mesh, but also the interaction between decolonising and Indigenous methodologies themselves. By viewing Indigenous and decolonising research as a relationship, I suggest that both are dynamic practices that do not exist outside of the people who use them. What these methodologies look like and how they relate to one another will ultimately depend upon who uses them, why they are used, and where they are practiced.
It is therefore important to address my own position as a researcher. I am a settler Canadian who grew up in rural Ontario and currently lives on Treaty 6 land in Edmonton, Alberta. On my father’s side, I descend primarily from Scottish ancestors who settled along the St. Lawrence seaway several generations ago. On my mother’s side, I descend from Polish Jewry who came to Canada as refugees after the Second World War. I do research in the field of genocide studies, and my personal history shapes my relationship to genocide in multiple ways: as a settler, I am in some ways implicated in the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island; both maternal grandparents are Holocaust survivors, and my grandmother has always encouraged my study of the Holocaust; furthermore, the Holocaust is sometimes used to justify ongoing settler colonial (and arguably genocidal) practices in Israel/Palestine. I want to conduct research that challenges settler colonialism – or at the very least does not reproduce it – but also need to avoid appropriating Indigenous ideas and practices. To do this, it is necessary to distinguish between Indigenous and decolonising approaches to research, explore my relationship to each, and consider how I might appropriately use these methodologies to resist genocide and colonialism.
Place, knowledge, and the university
A basic principle of Indigenous epistemologies and research methodologies is that knowledge exists within a set of relationships rooted in place or land.2 Indigenous understandings of place differ radically from dominant Western, in particular settler colonial, conceptions which view place as a geographically bounded and unchanging
2 The relationship between place and knowledge is not exclusive to Indigenous research. Positivist and universalist Western scientific practices deny that knowledge is situated in place and insist that research extracts universal truths that can be applied to other contexts. However, Western science’s denial of this relationship does not actually erase it. Like Indigenous knowledge, positivist Western knowledge is also situated in place. As I suggest in this paper, what is useful about Indigenous methodologies is that they acknowledge this relationship.
physical landscape (Tuck and McKenzie 2015, 59-67). According to Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie (2015, 31-43), place is rather constituted by a network of lived relationships between land, human persons, and other-than-human persons such as animals, plants, and climate. Its relational nature means that place is uneven, undergoing continual change, does not distinguish between insiders and outsiders, and is inextricably grounded in material, emotional, and spiritual reality (Tuck and McKenzie 2015, 29-46). All people exist within these relational networks and what one knows is produced in the encounter between person and place. To demonstrate the interdependence of knowledge and place, Herman Michell (2009) uses the practice of gathering berries as a metaphor for research. Like those gathering berries, researchers must go on a journey in search of something they need. Before gathering berries they must learn from elders where and when berries can be found, and then listen and respond to the land as they journey to and collect those berries. Within an Indigenous conception of place, however, it seems that place-based metaphors are not really metaphors at all. Knowledge literally does depend upon one’s relationship to the land and is exercised through encounters with the land, and berries are no less substantive (or useful) than statistics or discourse.
It is difficult to distinguish between place and land because both constitute – and are constituted by – a network of human and other-than-human relationships. Tuck and McKenzie (2015) suggest that the distinction is largely conceptual. Place is anthropocentric in that it emphasises the human component of these relationships while land is topocentric and views humans as peripheral. From an Indigenous perspective, ‘land’ may therefore be preferable to ‘place’ (Tuck and McKenzie 2015, 54-57). Still, the horizons of place and person are blurry. Joe Sheridan and Roronhiakewen Dan Longboat (2006) demonstrate that land and mind are inseparable. On one hand, an individual’s psychology and identity originate in a way of life determined by their relationship to the land; on the other hand, one’s mind reproduces the myths that transform place into Creation. In other words, land creates people while people sustain Creation, and ‘where one is has everything to do with who one is’ (Sheridan and Longboat 2006, 369). Land is always present but always changing, humans (and non-humans) exist in a dynamic relation with it, and what one knows emerges from these perpetually shifting networks. In regards to colonialism, settler societies use colonial violence to impose buildings and other structures on the land, and this imposition shapes the settler’s knowledge and relationship to land. But from an Indigenous perspective the land will always remain beyond these structures and, when the settler stops imposing them, the land will always emerge to reconstitute and reclaim its relationships.
The academy is itself a place that produces knowledge based on relationships. In a conversation with Coyote about graduate research, Raven asks whether ‘normalised knowledges and practices have an origin or did they just pop out of the ether fully writ?’ (Cole and O’Riley 2010, 324). Coyote answers by suggesting that knowledges, like words, contain etymologies that ‘do not evolve themselves outside of human power relations and
connotations’ (Cole and O’Riley 2010, 324). These power relations are obvious to university researchers observing the dynamics among faculties and disciplines, or within the hierarchies of studentship and professorship. Academic actors compete for funding from state and other corporate institutions, and those who produce knowledge that most privileges these institutions are most likely to receive funding (Cole 2004, 13-14). In Tuck and McKenzie’s (2015) description of place as an uneven network of power relations, the academy is certainly place. But even more concretely, they observe that ‘research is always situated physically...[and] is always undertaken by researchers and participants embedded in places’ (Tuck and McKenzie 2015, 1).
Academic research has historically privileged Western epistemologies, value systems, and institutions while marginalising Indigenous ones. Margaret Kovach (2009, 29) explains how academics ‘have become formidable gatekeepers of [knowledge systems] by objectifying knowledge into criterion-defined models, paradigms, and “truth”’ as a means to regulate ‘legitimate knowledge.’ That is, the academy determines ‘what does and does not count as knowledge’ (Kovach 2009, 29). The modern academy has evolved within a Cartesian intellectual tradition that views the mind and body as separate and privileges the former (Tuck and McKenzie 2015, 53-54, 151-152). Mind/body dualism posits that researchers can (and should) achieve intellectual neutrality through the objective measurement of physical reality, and favours knowledge produced through logic, abstract reason, and measurement (Harvey 2003, 125-126). Academic research therefore privileges those values and institutions that emerged from Enlightenment thinking such as individualism, private property, and capitalism (see Smith 2012, 61-62). This means that the academy actively marginalises ways of knowing that are non- objective and non-dualist, such as embodied or emplaced forms of knowledge. Specifically, it requires the marginalisation of Indigenous knowledges that view land, body, mind, and spirit as interconnected. The result is to force Indigenous researchers to ‘the borders of the vast and expanding territory that is the margin, that exists “outside” the security zone, outside the gated and fortified community’ (Smith 2012, 199). To consider this metaphor in a somewhat more literal sense, the academy becomes a geometrical plane3 with European epistemology positioned at the centre, Indigenous knowledges in the margins, and with the flow of power moving from the centre outwards. In other words, positivist scientific research is the dominant intellectual tradition in the university, and other practices may exist but remain in the periphery. The modern academy emerged from a tradition of Western science that is positivist and universalist, and this remains a dominant form of knowledge production in the university. In recent decades, other perspectives have emerged from the Western tradition that do not reproduce positivist or universalist assumptions, such as some feminist or antiracist paradigms. Some scholars also conceive of decolonising research as a Western paradigm
(Kovach 2009, 80). I discuss some non-positivist Western methodologies in the following sections and consider their usefulness within (or as) a decolonising paradigm.
Scholars argue that research ethics boards are extensions of academic institutions that function to reproduce Eurocentrism. University ethics boards promote a form of ethical practice that is unethical from an Indigenous perspective (Chilisa and Ntseane 2010; Cole 2004; Kovach 2009, 141-155; Weber-Pillwax 2004; Wilson and Restoule 2010). Ethics boards often rely on positivist approaches to ethics which privilege neutrality and seek to maintain distance between the researcher and researched. In contrast, Indigenous approaches to ethics emphasise that the researcher is accountable and must give back to the community involved with their research (Weber-Pillwax 2004, 79-81). Whereas Western ethics boards ask the researcher to be uninterested and uninvolved, Indigenous ethics require one who is deeply interested and involved. Applying positivist Western ethics within an Indigenous context can be harmful to the community (Kovach 2009, 141-155). Cole explains that the role of university ethics boards is to ensure that Indigenous peoples remain marginalised:
what coyote’s trying to say says raven is that ethics reviews are about ethics review boards
full stop end of conversation they are not about being ethical
universities and funding councils and the government which fund them have too much invested in appropriating or silencing nonwestern voices especially first nations’ voices (Cole 2004, 7).
For Cole, ethics boards promote positivism and Eurocentrism in academic research rather than ethical research practices.
Decolonising research methodologies challenge Eurocentrism by de-centring Western epistemologies and re-centring marginalised ones. If the problem with the academy is that it is Eurocentric, then decolonisation can be achieved by enabling non- Western peoples to step into its centre. This is the solution that Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) proposes. Academic space4 has been historically colonised by white men, although feminist, Indigenous, and other critical theorists are creating space for formerly marginalised peoples to step inside (Smith 2012, 165-169). Instead of privileging Western interests and practices, decolonising methodologies enable Indigenous researchers, for example, to ‘privilege indigenous concerns, indigenous practices and indigenous participation as researchers and researched’ (Smith 2012, 111). She does not challenge the basic framework of the academy, such as ‘privilege’ or the researcher/researched binary, and suggests that a re-orientation is sufficient. Nado Aveling (2013) argues that
4 When referring to ‘space,’ I mean ‘place’ in the aforementioned sense. I use ‘space’ only when it is the specific language of the cited author.
researchers should not ‘talk about what they don’t know,’ and she considers the role of an ally in decolonising research. She says that ‘the positionality of an ally is invariably tenuous and often accompanied by discomfort. It is a discomfort that is grounded in not being an expert and not being centre stage’ (Aveling 2013, 209). An ally is someone who steps to the side to make room for multiple voices, or even steps entirely aside if necessary. To decolonise research, positivist Western researchers must relinquish their monopoly on the academy – whether voluntarily or through force – so that marginalised voices can place their own needs and knowledge at the centre of research. While a re- centring approach does not require a significant transformation of the academy, it does mean that research is no longer guided by Western interests and suggests the potential for more radical change.
Within this framework, Indigenous methodologies are just one of many possible approaches to decolonising research. On the surface, Indigenous methodologies may appear to do little more than fill a void left by Western epistemologies pushed from the centre. This ostensibly appears to be what Dei suggests when he says:
Indigenous research works with the ‘epistemic saliency’ (i.e., acknowledging the relevance, authenticity and primacy of local claims of knowing) of marginalized voices in accounting for their own experiences of oppression and colonization...it rests on the important recognition of the centrality of such voice in a researcher coming to know and understand the lived experiences of the researched. Indigenous research foregrounds such voice, as well as the personal, experiential and a political subject in search for social change (Dei 2013, 34).
This agenda is not unique to Indigenous research for it can be said of other antiracist and anticolonialist approaches (Dei 2013, 29). Yet Dei also suggests that ‘Indigenous research is just one aspect of a much broader, transformative project of Indigenous resistance (and decolonization) in all spheres of life’ (Dei 2013, 29). Indigenous research is indeed one of many forces that can de- and re-centre the academic field, but that process ultimately opens the possibility for more significant transformations. Cora Weber-Pillwax (1999) argues that Indigenous peoples, meaning both researchers and communities, will be the ‘active-centre’ that shapes the values and intentions of Indigenous research methodologies. She also declares that this new approach ‘must inevitably lead to the dismantling of research structures based on western notions of scientific and intellectual hegemony’ (Weber-Pillwax 1999, 39). Indigenous methodologies are one of many forces that can aid in the decolonisation of the academy, and are also one of many practices that can flourish through decolonisation. But the de- and re-centring of the academy is only one step in a much larger decolonising project.
Feminist and Indigenous methodologies are similar in that researchers can use both for the purpose of decolonising research. Decolonisation of the academy is a broad project that generally entails the perpetual de- and re-centring of academic place, with this process opening up the possibility for more significant transformations. Anyone can work towards wresting Western epistemologies from their position of privilege, and in the wake of this coup anyone should be able to conduct research in which their own